Adventure games: lots of humorous storytelling, delightful art, and a lot of annoying mechanics that should all just die in a fire. Am I right?

Thimbleweed Park, the upcoming adventure game from Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick of Maniac Mansion fame, hopes to close the book on those crappy outdated old mechanics and get us back into adventure games.

Yahtzee is a game dev (natch), and he’s looking for ways to make an adventure game with storytelling more compelling. But what can you add to a story game that isn’t combat? Interesting question. How far outside the box can you go when making video games?

Pondering Adventure Games and Gameplay in Modern Gaming

Combat is certainly an option, but we’re talking about gameplay that enhances the all-important narrative, rather than interrupts it, and in that case combat kind of limits the kind of story you can tell. Survival horror does pretty well out of it, as did Spec Ops The Line, because violence and physical threat are very much at the core of the story themes those games are trying to bring across. Otherwise, it can feel a bit contrived.